2015/12/07

Usually, many path tracers over the CG market lack of any artistic control over the rendering.

There is nothing to have control of lighting on an artist point of view: contrast, flatness, hardness.

All you can do is working on Tone Mapping or on image post processing. It means that it is near impossible to preserve textures, colors or materials while doing such image degradation.

I implemented the ‘BOUGUER FACTOR’ in RIRE (Renderer inside Renderer).

The Bouguer Factor is a true control over Path Tracing for artist.
It allows, with:
- small value: very bright and soft lighting.
- bigger value: very dark (noir) and hard lighting.

All without compromising lighting realism (same number of bounces), while maintaining texture, colors and materials.

The use of the Bouguer Factor is just another good reason to do not have to add an Ambient Occlusion Pass to your rendering, and then have less render time. (Indeed, if you still need one, just use GAO).

2015/11/29

It also means that it is a renderer ‘pour rire’, (French expression meaning ‘not for real’).

RIRE is a Brute Force Naive Path Tracer, entirely written in OSL, and could be run (with some adjustments) on any good OSL Renderer, like AppleSeed or Cycles.
Just put a plane in front of your camera, and watch through the RIRE Rendering!

It is made only for educational purpose! It has absolutely no pretention for production, not even being fast. It is just to show and understand how a Path Tracer is made.

2015/06/11

OSL is a very powerful and high level shading language. It’ near possible to do anything with it, even the most unexpected shaders!

As I was working on the FOSPHORE project, I was thinking “… spheres, spheres, spheres, just like the very first 3D on personal computers… “ and Wosh! I rushed back in time, in 1986, to Eric Graham’s Juggler.

It was a true milestone in Computer Graphic! If we are using 3D software on our PC now, it’s also because, one day, a small Juggler animation told us “it’s possible to do it without Mainframe Computer, with the computer on your desktop!”.

So, here is my OSL version of the Juggler!

I try to do it as close as possible to the 1986 rendering. So I wrote a true Minimalist Ray Tracer inside the OSL shader.

This shader is near Real-Time. And you can play with it inside Blender! (The first Juggler was more than one hour rendering time on Amiga computer in 1986, in 320x200 pixels).

2015/05/16

Those Open Shading Language shaders convert any object to a bunch of spheres! With them, you can have a 6 polygones cube looking like one million spheres at rendering time, with no RAM overload.

This is purely shading: no particule, no molecular nor granular plugins. Just apply the shader to your object to turn it to thousands of spheres.

The main interest of those shader is education! They are not yet Production Ready Shaders!
The speed of those shaders is not so smaller than converting object to real sphere particules.
The granular tests made with Softimage ICE are even faster! (But it is Softimage ICE… Rest In Peace Softy)

In this post, you can see the first results of FOSPHORE_FILL.

This first shader fills an object with spheres of chosen size and space.
You can randomly change size, place, color… It’s also possible to animate the noise and the spheres.
There is no limits to the number of spheres, and you could have thousands and thousands spheres in your object!

Unfortunately, the shader is not yet to be released. There are still some bugs, and some optimization is needed. I also have to make it to work correctly with VRay.